Show Notes
With the 2026 midterms approaching and billions of dollars flooding into American elections, we're revisiting one of our most popular episodes of Master Plan.
In 1971, corporate lawyer Lewis Powell wrote a manifesto explaining how corporations and oligarchs could fight back against New Deal-era reforms and use their money to hijack American politics. For decades, the Powell Memo seemed like an urban legend — until our investigation uncovered new details about the people behind it, and how the memo’s author snuck his radical ideology into the Supreme Court.
Read the transcript and explore original archival documents from our investigation.
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More from Master Plan
Today, we are sharing the Season 3 premiere of The Future of Our Former Democracy, the Signal Award-winning podcast from More Equitable Democracy and Mori Strategies. The Future of Our Former Democracy has spent two seasons exploring what the U.S. can learn from democracies around the world, most recently Germany and then Ireland.
This week we’re sharing a special episode from You Might Be Right, the chart-topping politics podcast from the Baker School of Public Policy and Public Affairs at the University of Tennessee. It was recently named a “must-listen” by both NPR and Spotify.
In the season finale of Master Plan: The Kingmakers, we ask Democratic leaders what the next U.S. president should do with the expanded executive powers that Trump will leave behind.
A little-known conservative operative spends years figuring out how to bend the machinery of government to a president's will. By the time Donald Trump returns for his second term, a shadow government is ready to seize control.
Obama vowed to restore the rule of law after the War on Terror. But behind closed doors, his administration created a secret system that allowed the president to decide who lived and who died.